Francesca Ferlaino

Francesca Ferlaino received her Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Florence and the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy in Italy in 2004. After two years of post-doctoral research in Florence, she joined the Ultracold Atoms and Quantum Gases group at the University of Innsbruck in Austria as a visiting scientist. From 2007 to 2009, she was a Lise-Meitner fellow of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in Innsbruck, working mainly on Efimov physics and few-body physics with ultracold atoms. In 2009, she won the prestigious START Award from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research and the FWF, allowing her to establish a new research group at the Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck.

A prediction that resonantly interacting particles can form weakly bound trimer states remained a mere theoretical oddity for more than three decades until tunable ultracold gases caused the field to explode, with enormous progress in just the last year. Read More »